of life whose roots go back twenty-five
years to another crime: the kidnapping
and abuse of a young boy. In the present,
the grownup victim (Tim Robbins), and
the two friends who watched years ago as
he was driven away (Sean Penn and
Bacon), are held together by a bond of
shame and contempt. The working-class
Boston neighborhood, with its wood-
frame buildings, gray light, and tough,
anxious women clinging to their men,
has never recovered; it might be an an-
cient Greek city fallen under a curse. We
are what the past has made us, and Sean
Penn's Jimmy, a neighborhood store
owner and thug whose earlier life has
been marked by acts of vengeance, loses
his daughter and is forced to ask if,
in some way, he's responsible for her
death.
To work with such glum material
without falling into middlebrow drea-
riness requires intellectual force and
a steely grip on narrative. This movie,
too, turns into an argument about
violence. Falling in line behind Dirty
Harry and Little Bill, Jimmy is yet an-
other guy who imagines that he alone
embodies justice. He tries to avenge his
daughter's death, only to kill the wrong
man. But, then, a surprise: his wife
(Laura Linney), excited by his daring,
pulls him into bed. Eastwood had
moved past easily understood right and
wrong, past the plain satisfactions of
pattern. Killing for revenge is as idiotic
as killing for hire, yet this act is flagrantly
rewarded. From the beginning, going
back to his performance in "A Fistful of
Dollars," Eastwood had shown a pen-
chant for irony, but the end of "Mystic
River" was a perverse twist worthy of a
sardonic modern artist like Brecht or
F assbinder.
E astwood had reached the summit,
and, at seventy-three, he appeared
to be taking stock. For years, he had
played angry men who held the fort of
white-male authority. Now, returning
to elements from "Josey Wales," he
began to notice and even to celebrate
true outsiders, people who had much
less power than his own characters did.
Had he become, of all things, a liberal?
Probably not, at least not in any overtly
political sense. It's more likely that, as he
got older, he saw his own prized values
embodied in people he had essentially
ignored before. Women, after all, had
rarely been at the center of his movies.
One can remember Verna Bloom's ten-
derness in supporting roles, and, in the
late seventies and early eighties, a few
sassy performances by Sondra Locke,
who was then Eastwood's inamorata. In
"Tightrope," Geneviève Bujold pro-
jected a taut intelligence, and Meryl
Streep had a never-met-the-right-man
wistfulness in "The Bridges of Madison
County." But many of the women were
predatory or adoring, and none of them,
even the strong ones, quite prepared us
for Hillary Swank's pugnacious jaw and
wide smile in "Million Dollar Baby"
(2004). At first, the fight-club setting
gives off the sour-sweat odor of defeat.
As Eastwood and Morgan Freeman rag
on each other, the movie seems a joke
between aging friends (the lines are
a duet for buzz saw and cello). But
Eastwood himself turns out to be the
butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald
(Swank) breaks into this second-rate
male province, trains as a fighter, and
pulls the snarling old man out of emo-
tional isolation into something like fa-
therhood and, finally, the full humanity
of mourning. Maggie could give and
take a punch. The movie was less an ex-
pression of feminist awareness than a
case of awed respect for a woman who
was strong and enduring. (The theme
was woodenly repeated in "Change-
ling," from 2008, in which Angelina
Jolie's betrayed mother takes on the
L.A.P.D.)
In the same way, Eastwood began to
see, in minority groups, even in Ameri-
càs former enemies, what he had long
admired in tough white men. Certainly,
no one in American movies has ever
done anything quite as openhearted as
Eastwood's 2006 feat of recounting the
devastating battle ofIwo Jima from both
points of view. Eastwood's critical ac-
count of the Army's crass media exploi-
tation of American soldiers ("Flags of
....
('
. , I J
t
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y,
.
1-...
,(
Our Fathers") took the shine off the vic-
tory. (It was lucky that Wayne, who
starred in "Sands oflwo Jima," in 1949,
didn't live to see the picture.) Then, a few
months later, he brought out "Letters
from Iwo Jima," a portrait of the Japa-
nese, particularly the island's military
commander, General Kuribayashi (Ken
Watanabe), as supremely dutiful, and
honorable in defeat. Shot in black-and-
white, the two movies, neither of them
great but both intelligent and stirring,
were placed in conversation with each
other as profiles of national character-
dialectical partners in an imaginary but
potent debate.
Part of Eastwood's late curiosity has
been directed at new aspects of himself:
a superb animal inexorably growing
older. Rather than fight his years, East-
wood has explicitly dramatized aging-
the slowing of reflexes, the hardening
of perception and will. Back in 1993,
with "In the Line of Fire," he managed,
in the midst of a first-rate thriller (di-
rected by Wolfgang Petersen), to sug-
gest that men his age compensate for
perceived weakness by overly focussing
on the task at hand-a fresh insight. He
didn't revive Dirty Harry, who would
have been a grimly witty old party, but
Walt Kowalski, the irascible retired auto
worker in "Gran Torino" (2008), is a
variation on Callahan. Living in a house
outside Detroit, next door to a family of
Hmong refugees, Kowalski is inde-
tl h . 1 " ks " d " 1 "
cen y OStl e- goo an s opes are
among his daily epithets-but, by de-
grees, he becomes impressed with the
family's insistence on discipline, and
rouses himself to protect it. Who can
doubt that Eastwood's shift from loath-
ing to compassion was an oblique rejec-
tion of the endless American rancor
over immigration? The man who once
walked away at the end was now gravely
taking responsibility for everything,
a development that was enlarged in
"Invictus." As Kowalski, Eastwood lit-
erally growled, as if teasing his limits
as an actor, but Kowalski is also a true
terror. Eastwood's skull stood out from
beneath his skin; his eyes were like
smoldering coals. He was never a more
dominating star. .
NEWYORKER.COM/GO/ ASK
David Denby takes questions from readers.